The bandit was often educating Douglas like that, which was something he appreciated, though sometimes the explanations he gave did not make things any clearer than they had been before. Like the time when, after they first signed up for the job in the Keys, they learned that a man they knew from the government camp had been turned down for the same job and sent to work in another camp instead. He was mad about it, and said, They save all the best jobs for the white boys. This had surprised Douglas, because he hadn’t known until then that the man, Ben Stokes was his name, wasn’t a white boy himself. They were keeping all the work camps segregated, even though everyone got along just fine, and so that was how Douglas found out Ben Stokes was a Negro, because he went to a Negro camp, and because he was bitter about all the choice jobs going to white folks.
When Douglas asked the bandit if Ben was a Negro, the bandit laughed and said, Sure!
Douglas said, What? And the bandit said again, Sure, you ain’t never seen a nigger don’t look like a nigger before?
When Douglas said he had not, the bandit said, Well, how do you know you haven’t if you already said you wouldn’t know if you saw him? and Douglas said that was precisely the point. But by that time the bandit was no longer interested and Douglas did not get any more information out of him, and often afterward he would look at a white man and wonder if he was really a white man, or look at a black man and wonder if there was any possibility he was actually white. It was more difficult to imagine that a black man could be a white man than the other way around, he found, because it did always seem conceivable that with a white man he had failed to detect some element of blackness in his skin, which had such gradations to it, and less likely that he might mistake blackness for white, and so, though he decided that this was unlikely, he was not prepared to rule the possibility out entirely. And sometimes he thought of Ben Stokes afterward and wondered how he was faring in the Negro camp and if there were really less opportunities for Negroes than for white folks, because it was just as hard to imagine how there could be less opportunities for any man than there were in the Upper Keys as it was to imagine a black man that was white. But it was clear that nothing was as it appeared to be and that his estimation of anything and understanding of it were almost certain to be false, and that there existed a great deal more complexity and contradiction to any thing than ever met the eye.
IT WAS NOT LONG after the news of the Patman Bill that the men on Windley Key began to talk of a strike. In February, a small battle raged between the veterans and the camp officials, and even though most of the organizers of the strike were soon driven out of the camp—they headed back to Washington to continue their protest there—and there was a growing concern among the men that the whole project (which ran at the best of times only in fits and starts) would be abandoned, and the labor they had done before the strike would remain unpaid, not one of them lifted a finger to lengthen the highway and the tourists got no nearer for the entire month of February.
One of the veterans, a real southern gentleman (or so, at least, he would have you believe)—name of Spencer Ford—was one of the organizers who stayed on. At the end of February he even managed to get a sit-down with the camp commanders, and the night before it was to take place he called a general meeting to compose a list of grievances he planned to bring to the management’s attention the very next day. Number one was sanitation, of course—but then once they got going nearly everything needed improving, and the men started shouting all at once until Spencer Ford held his hand up, like he was accustomed to being listened to, and sure enough the men quieted down, and Ford said, I am drawing up a list of only our most pressing concerns, gentlemen.
So they decided on three main points for Ford to discuss with the camp commanders the next day, but neither Ford nor the three men who accompanied him to represent the veterans’ affairs ever returned to report on how their demands were received, so they never did know. It was rumored the four had been shipped off to Fort Jefferson, though some said they had only been sent back to Miami, from which point they were encouraged to “make their own way”—anywhere but back to Windley Key—and still others said they knew for certain they had been taken into international waters and drowned.
Whatever the case, neither Ford nor any of his men were heard from again, and the veterans’ situation did not improve. There was continued talk, after that, of heading back to Washington—of remaining there, this time, and no mistake, until the bonus was paid—but everyone, including Douglas and the bandit, when they talked of leaving, talked of leaving “after the next paycheck,” in order to ensure they had something with which to start the journey. But that day was always, at any given point, at least two weeks away, because as soon as any paycheck arrived it would be the next paycheck that would decide them and the paycheck that came was spent, at least in significant part, drinking at Josie Russell’s Bar.
—
BEFORE THEY KNEW IT, IT WAS JULY, AND ROYAL ROBERTSON—THAT charismatic veteran from California (who, it was rumored, had once been a star on the silver screen—though no one could ever actually claim to having seen him in the pictures)—had moved his troops into Washington, establishing himself and his followers in a vacant lot off Pennsylvania Avenue. It was like 1932 all over again! With this encouragement, half a dozen men did go—taking whatever was left of their last paycheck, if there was any left over at all. But most of them—Douglas and the bandit among them—stayed on through the brutal heat of that summer, and so were still there on the first of September, 1935, when the hurricane hit.
THE NEXT DAY BEING Labor Day, most everyone was drunk the night before the storm. They sat together in the small tavern on Windley Key, drinking what was left to drink and leaning from their chairs as though they hadn’t a care in the world.
Many of them, like Douglas and the bandit, were still there at six o’clock in the morning, when the roof blew off.
A general confusion erupted then. Men rounded up vehicles in order to head to Key West—but there weren’t many. Word came that a train was on its way—but hours passed and the train never arrived. Soon they had no choice but to give up on the train; to turn their attention instead— too late—to whatever they had on hand. As the winds picked up to a frightening speed in the early afternoon, some of the men began to dig trenches in the dirt just like the ones that had saved them on so many occasions before, back in France.
Like all terrible things, it arrived, when it did, all of a sudden—as though without warning. There was nothing to do but brace themselves against it. But even that was not a thing they did, it was just a thing that happened. It seemed to Douglas as if the whole world had suddenly been swept out from under him. At first he could see nothing at all, so it was a relief when he managed to catch sight of the bandit. He could make out only a dim shadow on account of the direction and force of the storm, but he knew it was the bandit. Leaning there, into the wind—his body turned toward Douglas, though he did not seem to see him. It took another several seconds before Douglas understood why. The bandit’s face, left exposed, had (Douglas realized only now, with horror) been completely torn off by the wind, which was by then whipping the sand from the beach with the force of a thousand tiny grenades. Douglas may have screamed at the sight, but he could not be certain. It is possible it was only the wind that he heard, which he mistook as his voice—or equally that it was his voice that he mistook for the wind. He looked around for shelter, his hands shielding his face and his eyes. The mess house did not exist any longer. Nothing existed. Once, he looked back, toward where the bandit remained, and though he could still make out the outline of his shadow, he no longer recognized him. It was a great mystery what kept him riveted there.
He ran, and did not stop until he reached the last stretch of road, built just before the storm. It ran adjacent to the railroad and a small trestle bridge, which spanned a small estuary emptying off into marshland. Somehow Douglas managed to wedge himself underneath the bridge, and only then—protecte
d by the overhang—was he able to remove his hands from his eyes. What he saw, he did not immediately comprehend: it was the ocean. Raised on its back, like a great horse on hind legs, and moving steadily toward him.
How it was that he managed to brace himself against the wooden ties of the railway bridge; how it was that he remained there, as the ocean crashed over him—crushing his bones with its weight—he would never know. At the time, indeed, he couldn’t be certain if he was alive or dead, and even after the wave passed he remained braced against a force that no longer existed except in his memory of its having been.
Four times the ocean surged and plunged and crushed him beneath it, and four times he managed, somehow, to hold on. But it was not— he knew then, and always after—according to his own will he was sustained. It was according to some other force, hardly proper to him—the same, perhaps, that had threatened at one time to crush the bandit’s throat—that he remained, clinging to the underside of a trestle bridge, fourteen feet in the air, as the waves beat against him, and huge ugly crabs fell with the weight of stones, and then continued their slow unthinking course over his body just as naturally as though he were not still suspended above it but lay already at the bottom of the sea. They crept in through the tears and folds of his clothes, locating whatever warmth existed, close to the skin. Later—no; he would be unable to account for it. How it was he’d managed to hold on all that time. Because, even years afterward, when he thought of it, he wished he could have drowned. That he could have had his flesh torn from his face and fingers and been laid out to dry like the swollen bodies he found the next morning, splayed on the beach or suspended from trees. Their clothes torn from them, their skin blasted. That he would not have been among those few who remained. Roaming about, without speaking, looking among the ruins for other survivors—and not recognizing, equally, when he met them, the living and the dead.
VI.
Sutton
ON THE WARPATH. WASHINGTON, D.C., WINTER 1936— WITH A BRIEF DETOUR TO NEW YORK CITY, 1928—NEW YORK CITY, SUMMER 1936—VARIOUS LOCATIONS IN THE SOUTH, SOUTHWEST, AND MIDDLE WEST OF THE UNITED STATES, 1937—NEW YORK CITY, 1937–1941—LONDON, 1942—THE HAGUE, GUADALCANAL, GUAM, MAKIN ISLAND, 1943—NEW YORK CITY, CASSINO VALLEY, ROME, 1944— BERLIN, DACHAU, 1945.
In January 1936, when the Bonus Bill finally passed, Sutton had been working for just over three months at the Washington Evening Star. She put her name in for the story, even though she knew she didn’t stand a chance of covering it. Jim Dalling, editor in chief, had already made that much clear: he was never going to send her, or any woman, for that matter, he said, to cover the news on the streets. The Star was not the Los Angeles Examiner, and had no need of the sort of journalism propagated by the likes of William Randolph Hearst, say, or any of his “sob sisters.” Well, she was no “sob sister,” Sutton had told Dalling. He would find that out sooner or later if he was willing to give her a try. Dalling had just chuckled and shuffled the papers on his desk, marking the end of their interview.
I like that, he had told her. A woman with spirit; a woman with grit. Yes, I would not be surprised, he said, if you are invited to Mondays at the White House very soon.
Sutton was still working copy for the “women’s pages” then, but if she was lucky, Dalling told her when she was hired, she stood a decent chance of becoming one of “Eleanor’s girls”—allowed to attend the First Lady’s weekly press conferences. Still, she put her name in for “street” jobs from time to time anyway—just to let Dalling know that he could always change his mind.
Even when, three days later, the President vetoed the bill, the verdict—which had easily passed through the Senate—was never in doubt. Roosevelt’s veto was purely symbolic—intended only in order to save face after his having so staunchly opposed the motion for so long. He managed to look unwavering and resolute and, in the end, still got credit for passing the bill.
Within a week the bonus checks were being mailed out all over the country—the average payment somewhere in the vicinity of $550.
Once again, Sutton suggested a story. It would be from the “women’s angle,” she said. What did it mean to the families who had waited so long to receive their check? To the women who had been left behind when their men marched off, first to France, and then to Washington, after the war? What did it feel like, after such a long wait, for the bonus to actually arrive? But by the time Dalling got around to seriously considering her proposal, even Sutton recognized it was too late—the whole thing more or less forgotten. What remained of it was only the taint on Hoover’s career from the riot of ’32, and the more recent scandal surrounding FDR’s “rehabilitation” projects after, just that past September, hundreds of veterans had been drowned off the Florida Keys.
For six months there had been a call to investigate the disaster from the VFW, the American Legion, and a spattering of citizen groups, but the Roosevelt administration held it off; the official stance was that the veterans’ deaths had been an act of God.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” it was decided in a government meeting directly following the disaster. “But not everyone makes hurricanes. It may be ignorance and error in judgment on the part of the government but it is not a crime, and to measure the ignorance and the errors in judgment of the government or any one man against the ignorance and the errors of judgment of nature, is to measure a single grain of sand against the bed of an ocean.”
Still, the taint on Roosevelt’s career did not go away overnight. He continued to be criticized for the “mistakes,” however relative in the cosmic scheme, his administration had made. Most notably, this criticism came from Massachusetts Representative Edith Nourse Rogers, who had been elected to her husband’s seat in Congress in 1926 and had promptly become the self-appointed protector and champion of disabled veterans. She insisted loudly that the truth about the veterans killed in the Labor Day hurricane was being systematically withheld, and after being twice refused a direct audience with the President, she further complained that a “reign of terror” existed in Washington, and that ordinary employees of the government were afraid to “express themselves.”
Finally, in March, six months after the disaster, several hearings were called in order to address the issue of compensation. It was a whitewash—an undisguised attempt to “clean up” the mess that had, since the hurricane, refused to go away. Rogers was well aware of this, but could do nothing but hound witnesses and argue bitingly with the chairman of the investigation, John Elliott Rankin—and Wright Patman, also on the committee, who still maintained the “act of God” position. Patman called for a “point of order” whenever Rogers mentioned anything that deviated from the agreed-upon New Deal script.
Sutton put her name in to cover this story, too. This was certainly, she insisted in her note to Dalling, a “women’s issue”—belonging next to the exposés on cosmetics companies and decorating tips. Again she was refused.
She went to the hearing anyway. There was, after all—she realized—nothing to stop her.
When Rogers asked Ivan R. Tannehil—the assistant chief of the Weather Bureau’s forecasting service at the time of the hurricane—if, according to his professional knowledge and opinion, he would have chosen Islamorada as a place to send veterans for rehabilitation, Rankin almost leapt from his seat, invoked a point of order, and accused Rogers of “embarrassing the witness.” Sutton scribbled all this down and more, then went home and typed up a piece. She turned it in to Dalling early the next morning, but Dalling told her that the story had “already run.”
Not in the “women’s pages,” she said.
This is not a woman’s story, he said.
He did not find Sutton’s “spirit” as amusing this time as he had before. Finally, though, to her surprise, her story did run—and not in the “women’s pages,” either, but on page three of the national news. The delay had in fact proved opportune because on June 1, Rogers had come back with one last swing when the bill for relief of the hurricane
veterans finally came to a vote. She accused Rankin of refusing to call key witnesses, and of withholding anything that suggested a contradiction to the preestablished “act of God” theory.
The government, and everyone seated here today, knows, she said, that though what occurred in Florida may well have been an act of God, the responsibility for those men’s lives was not God’s, but our own—all of us gathered here today. These responsibilities were not carried out.
The Relief Bill passed and even those who had championed the “act of God” position throughout the proceedings were glad that something had been done—enough at any rate to quiet Rogers.
IT WASN’T UNTIL 1941, five years later, that Sutton ran across any mention of the Bonus Army again. She was working “on the street” by then, for the New York Herald Tribune, when she caught wind of the story. Someone had come across what they claimed to be one of Eddie Gosnell’s famous photographs of Hushka and Carlson—the two men killed in the July ’32 riot—photographs that had later mysteriously disappeared. Gosnell himself had been found dead in a rented room in an apparent suicide back in ’33—an event that had at the time caused quite a stir, though very little of it got into the press. None of the veterans believed that Gosnell’s death was a suicide. It was rumored, instead, that he had made some powerful enemies leading up to, and then directly following, the publication (some weeks after the riots) of the photographs he’d taken of the two dead men. Why—it was wondered aloud—had it taken so long for the photographs to appear? What had stopped Gosnell from printing them right away?
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